Meta-Google confronts William Burroughs’ artistic heritage with Google, the symbol company of today’s soft global digital capitalism, in order to question our relationship with pictorial digital proliferation. His experimental writings and his use of the random factor as a creative process have inspired me for many years. According to him, written words came before spoken words “I advance the theory that in the electronic revolution a virus is a very small unit of word and image.”, which led Burroughs to write many texts on the control system of written languages. I insert several of his aphorisms in my own pictures.
The Google company (now a.k.a Alphabet …) with the ubiquitous presence of its search engine and its implication in so many future developments have crystallized a growing collective skepticism towards a digital future that is raising more and more issues, including Artificial Intelligence and Cybernetic Consciousness and their inherent questionings over life and death. From the hundreds of thousands of google “Google” images collected, a random selection is printed on lenticular panels and then stuck onto black metal sheet. For me, this black assembling is a kind of iconoclastic gesture: the black background tends to erase the images into a large monochromatic black picture. But there are still some traces, some shadows, some ghost-images, visible through the transparency left by the empty cut space from Burroughs’ text, or from the side angles and the light reflections coming from outside. All these unexpected ghost shadows tell us that something is about to disappear.
The whole paradigm of our relationship with images has changed. The Internet generates a profusion of images in which there is nothing to see. These works are talking about the disappearance of images through their circulation and excessive proliferation, but also the death of death and the potential disappearance of humans as a biological-only species. This Meta-Google series tends to create a mirror-image of its own disappearance, a meta-image that conveys the feeling that behind each image there is something about to disappear. Hence, an echo to Burroughs’ iconoclasm: Rub out the Word, Word begets Image, Image is Virus.